Thursday, January 26, 2017

‘There isn’t Any “Russian” Oil; There is Only Khanty and Tatar Oil,’ Moscow Scholar Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, January 26 – Russians and
others are accustomed to speaking of “Russian oil,” Moscow State University
philosopher Maksim Goryunov says; but it is no more Russian than English tea
from India and Sri Lanka is English. Instead, it is “a colonial good,”
extracted far “from those places where Great Russia was born.”

In a comment for “Novaya gazeta,” he
points out that “Russian” oil in fact comes from “territories historically
belonging to the tribes of the Khanty and Mansi,” with a smaller part from
Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Krasnoyarsk Kray and Sakhalin, all places the empire
added to its core (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2017/01/23/71258-hantskaya-neft).

And were the peoples from whose
territories the oil is taken fully compensated for their oil, Goryunov says,
they would be living as well as any of the Gulf petro-states; and the money
from the oil would not be going to pay for Moscow’s imperial projects and in
support of Russians’ imperial perspectives.

Like English tea, he begins, “which
in fact was Indian, Sri Lankan and Chinese,” the philosopher observes, “Russian”
oil is in fact “Khanty, Nentsy, Mansi, Tatar, Bashkir and Aleut.”The Russians reached the upper Ob at the same
time English ships came to the shores of India, but the British left Indiain 1947 while Moscow began extracting oil
there in the 1960s.

Goryunov writes that “the British
East India Company, which brought tea to England, was well-known for its
inhuman attitude toward Indians. But how humane are Russian oil companies
toward the indigenous peoples? What do the Khanty and Mansi get for the fact
that giant oil fields were found on their lands?”

What they get, he continues, is not
wealth but the destruction of the environment and their way of life, all from
company officials who won’t even hire them to do work because they view them as
“incompetent” or worse.

Not surprisingly, given this
attitude and the fact that they have lost the basis for their survival, “the
Khanty and Mansi protest on a regular basis,” Goryunov says. They have even “frequently
threatened to take up arms” to defend themselves and their way of life. Local
officials have tried to calm the situation.

They’ve secured promises from the oil
companies to pay the local people compensation, but the Moscow philosopher
says, the companies have not met their obligations to do so either in time or
amount.As a result, he continues, “the
conflict smolders but hasn’t gone out” and can break out at any time.

And meanwhile, “Khanty oil fills up
the budget of the Russian Federation, feeds its imperial dreams, and pays for
wars, Olympiads, ‘rising from one’s knees,’ and greatness.” Muscovites today “prefer
to rent their apartments to ‘persons of Slavic nationality’ and ignore the fact
that their city and the entire country exists on account of the Khanty and
Mansi.”

He continues: “the oil companies and
the Kremlin behind them maintain their right to sell Khanty oil bypassing the Khanty
pockets,” a clear manifestation of “the roots of the present-day Kremlin style
in foreign and domestic policy,” one that is based on an economic model from
the 19th century rather than even the 20th.

That model, Goryunov says, is based
on “the export of colonial goods for which only miserly compensation is given
in the form of gas and snowmobiles, which are the contemporary analogue to the
beads” colonial rulers offered those they seized in the past. And it rests on a
fundamental lie that few are prepared to challenge.

That lie holds that “’Russian oil’
is in fact Russian, while the Khanty and Mansi are simply people in national
costumes who don’t have any relationship to the billions of oil dollars” – in exactly
the same way that the British of the 19th century talked about
English tea and evidence of just how deeply embedded in Russian culture
imperialism remains.